Report Finds Shift Toward Extended Families

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By SAM ROBERTS
Published: March 18, 2010

The extended family is making something of a comeback, thanks to delayed marriage, immigration, and recession-induced job losses and foreclosures that have forced people to double-up under one roof, an analysis of census figures has found.

“The Waltons are back,” said Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, which conducted the analysis.

Multigenerational families, which accounted for 25 percent of the population in 1940 but only 12 percent by 1980, inched up to 16 percent in 2008, according to the analysis.

The analysis also found that the proportion of people 65 and older who live alone, which had been rising steeply for nearly a century — from 6 percent in 1900 to 29 percent in 1990 — declined slightly, to 27 percent.

At the same time, the share of older people living in multigenerational families, which plummeted to 17 percent in 1980 from 57 percent in 1900, rose to 20 percent.

While the pre-World War II extended family may have been idealized as a nurturing cocoon, the latest manifestation is too recent and a result of too many factors, positive and negative, to be romanticized.

“It calls to mind one of the famous lines in American poetry, from Robert Frost: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,’ ” Mr. Taylor said. “I don’t know that I can offer a value judgment of whether it’s good or bad. It reflects our time.”

The decline of extended families coincided with an exodus to the suburbs, where many young adults preferred to raise their children, and the enactment of Social Security and Medicare, which made older adults more financially independent.

The latest overall shift coincides with a number of demographic changes, including delayed marriage, greater longevity, more grown children (the baby boomers) with whom the elderly can share a household, Medicare cuts enacted in 1997 and the growing number of immigrants, who are more likely than native-born Americans to live in extended families.

The shift appears to have been accelerated by the recession. In 2008, at the beginning of the recession and the latest year for which figures are available, 2.6 million more Americans lived in a multigenerational household than did the year before.

Perhaps as a result of job losses and foreclosures that have affected young adults, in particular, a majority of multigenerational households that include a family member 65 or older are headed by that older adult. In Pew surveys, older adults say they do not want to be a burden on their children, but many also are less healthy and many men are more depressed if they are living alone.

The growth of extended families has also been facilitated by another phenomenon: the average single-family home is about twice as big as it was several decades ago.

The shift to extended families was evident across the board, but it was more widespread among blacks and Asian- and Hispanic- Americans than among non-Hispanic whites.

While the share of 65-to-84-year-olds living alone began to decline, as Americans lived longer and healthier lives, the proportion of those 85 and older living by themselves grew, to 39 percent in 2008 from 22 percent in 1970.

Among adults 65 and over, half are married, a share that has remained fairly constant since 1900. Among the unmarried, a century ago, only 1 percent were divorced or separated and 8 in 10 were widowed; today, nearly 1 in 4 are divorced and 6 in 10 are widowed.

Nearly half the 49 million Americans living in extended families are in households made up of two adult generations, with the youngest adult at least 25 years old. Almost as many live in households with three or more generations.